Agency 1980 Paper Man 1971

Good movies. Bad sources/transfers

Also known as "The Agency" on the original DVD and VHS media.This is a really bizarre "B" movie. I inherited the original DVD from my belated ex. The original is now selling on Amaz0n for under 3 d011ars but beware it is terrible quality. I don't know about the quality of this on-demand copy at 4 times the price.Despite the impressive cast, these actors must have been desperate for income to have become involved with this movie. I can see how the story sounded like a great idea to them. Unfortunately, it is clearly the work of a substandard director with a low budget and poor quality equipment. I can't blame the actors. They needed to work to pay their bills like the rest of us and probably had no idea just how bad the movie would turn out after the director ruined every aspect he touched.The movie opens with this utterly bizarre group of dancers wearing demonic, S&M costumes which is almost laughable and would have emptied the theater. The dance is supposedly a commercial for an anti-perspirant. The story was a good concept but this director turned it into trash. There was no excuse. With the story and this cast, he could have made a good movie similar to "Looker" which had similar theme and better direction. You might want to read some of the IMDB reviews... mostly 1 stars. They quite correctly related how this opening drag dancing sequence led the viewers to think this was some p0rn movie. I had the same concern when I watched it the first time and nearly turned it off before watching the rest which was sheer torture with the bad sound. The opening scene best illustrates the mindset of this bad director who would barely qualify for TV movies much less films.I think the original concept of the movie by the writer was a good idea. It was the director, amateurish crew and production company who turned it into trash. I read up on the director; a Hungarian with no decent list of films under his belt. He took a good concept and turned it into a poor, low budget joke. The ridiculous dialogues and scenes are clearly the fault of the director. Low budget has nothing to do with bad judgment or bad directing. I think this director's only attribute was his friendship with Mitchum... but even Mitchum and Lee Majors could not save the terrible job this director did. A high school teen with a home video camera could have done a much better job. I'm sure this left a bad taste for Majors and Mitchum when they saw what the director had done.The movie has bizarre scenes, terrible sound quality... no redubbing so you get all the trash noise picked up by the microphones. In some scenes, it is quite muffled. In others, the sound is over compressed and rattles in the speakers. At other times, it blasts you out of the chair. I doubt there was any professional sound editing dept involved with this movie. The rest of the audio distortion was from the age of the film reel used to produce the original DVD.The camera quality is the type you would have using old 1960's TV studio equipment (As a former TV camera operator in my teens, I recognize the quality of the old mounted cameras and grainy images). You can see the slight movement of the camera operator during stationary shots. You can see his breathing while he holds onto the camera controls... something you would not see from a good professional camera operator.My original DVD copy shows degradation of color and grainy clarity with muffled sound. This original version appears to have been copied from an old movie film reel copy which had been cloned one too many times. I don't know if this DVD on demand copy is any better. I think I will buy it just to see if there is any improvement in the sound. As it is on my original copy, the dialogue is very hard to hear due to the muffling. There is no closed captioning or subtitles to help with the bad audio. However, not all of the sound problem is from the old film reel. For instance, in some scenes, Lee Major's microphone is better quality while the second actor's microphone is muffled and distorted. This happens in more than one scene with more than one actor... so it is obvious that they had one bad microphone which they never bothered to fix as they used it in numerous scenes. Majors usually had the best microphone but not in every scene.I think this original story could be refilmed and turned into a halfway decent movie with a better director and a complete rewrite of the screenplay... however, they would have to change the title since this one carries a bad stigma. I would not recommend any movie from this director, George Kaczender. Avoid his movies like the plague. He obviously learned nothing from his first 20 years of experience, so I doubt he did any better on his later work unless the producers kept a firm thumb on him. Anything that turned out decent under his directorship was unlikely his doing... rather the efforts of others to prevent him from destroying it.Between the bad sound, bad directing and degrading quality of the video... I doubt you would like this movie. If this DVD-R on demand version is any better in quality, I'll update the review.

One of my favorite movies of all time. The apotheosis of cheese, on par with Can't Stop the Music (albeit different genre). Sinister, great plot. You'll be on the edge of your seat, which may be wet after seeing the S&M "No Sweat" deodorant commercial. I'm surprised Lee Majors didn't have a bigger career. Well, he IS a bit wooden. But what do you expect from a Hunkasaurus Rex? A bargain at twice the price.

Audiences won't be ready for this for at least another decade.

If you can get through the absolutely atrocious transfer to digital or whatever, this is a great piece of the late 70s/early 80's cheese movies. The audio track is so poor, it's downright laughable at best, but if you use the subtitles, you also discover the plot is equally bad ...

This is really not very good and it only gets two stars as at least it starts a story, ends it, and has the plot consistent--if absurd--throughout. The sound quality is worse. We begin with an absurd plot that people are fools and easily manipulated because the want to be and as much as the news currently tells us this is true, people act in what the perceive as their own self interest and a degree of self actualization can be huge as long as basic needs are met. So, with an absurd plot what else can one do? Well tell a story and they did here. The copy here suggests there is not a better one to master sound from so maybe letting this die in a video locker would have been a better use.

Surprisingly fun little movie that I never heard of previously. Loved LEE in this dramedy. The best part was everything worked out and Lee was looking healthy and happy.

Cheesy plot, bad jokes, cheap production values. Yup, that's a "B" Movie alright. That's not the bad part, though -- as other reviewers have stated, it's the actual transfer quality of this film that is the big problem.I watched the Amazon Prime Video digital version, and the version of the film that was used to convert to digital had horrible sound quality (to the point of not being able to understand the dialog) and also had parts where the film "flickered", like when a VHS tape was "re-tracking" in a player (for those of you old enough to remember trying to play worn-out versions of a VHS tape). Obviously, whoever converted this film for the digital version available through Prime was not using an original master copy of the film.If you do wind up watching the digital version of this film anyway, I would suggest turning on Close Captioning, so that when the sound gets really bad you can at least read what the actors are saying -- not that the plot is that hard to follow, though.

I have always enjoyed this movie. Following The Six Million Dollar Man's five year run from 1974-78 (not counting the three PILOTs from 1973)Lee Majors made five feature films between 1978 and 1980 Killer Fish (1978) The Norseman (1978) , Steel (1979), The Last Chase (1980) and this one Agency. before settling back to television with High Noon Part Two: The Return Of Will Kane then the five-year favourite'The Fall Guy'.It's a shame that these films have not been released in high quality DVD format because they are all entertaining for different reasons. It would be great to hear Lee himself share his memories of this time with such co-stars as James Franciscus, Karen Black, Gary Collins etc.Ironically when I saw that Agency was finally released on DVD with actual stills from the film, naturally I assumed that it would be a nice remastered print...WRONG! My television VHS print I had from the mid-nineties is ten times better! Don't get rid of your VHS tapes unless you are sure that the DVDs you intend replacing them with are superior prints.I won't go into too much detail about the film at this stage until someone finally does this film justice.

As many of the other reviews say, this film has poor audio and picture and is badly cropped especially on the right side. On the plus side it does have Saul Rubinek in it, but unless You are a die hard fan of one of the main actors then I'd give this a miss, its cheap but its cheap for a reason. It has a blank dvd with just agency which is always a sign of a rip off. This is not an original release as the other reviews say and maybe the copyright has expired and that is how they are able to produce this trash, but it was a quirky thing to see and Saul Rubinek is very young with an afro lol.

The Agency is a 'B' movie, possibly made for TV and the print of this DVD seems to have come from a VHS recorded off a TV set. Nonetheless it is an interesting story about subliminal messaging through inaudible sound hidden in TV audio signals. Two other movies that I can recommend in this vein are 'Control Factor' with Elizabeth Hurley of Showgirls fame or infamy, and John Carpenter's. 'They Live'.

Thank you!

Discreto film. Passabili audio e video.